Most arguments are loud. The one in Elijah's poem is almost silent, which is what makes it uncomfortable. In nine short lines the speaker describes a split inside themselves: "my mind, / my body, / they are different." That is all the poem claims at first. Its real subject turns out to be a third presence, the "I" left standing between the two. The central idea is that a person is not simply mind plus body. When those two fall out of step, whoever is left over has to live with it.
The pronouns carry most of this. The poem opens with possession: "my mind," "my body." The speaker starts as the owner of both. Then comes "they," and the two parts become separate agents, almost people. By the end the ownership has slipped away entirely, and the speaker is "dealing with *their* shit." The "my" of the opening has become "their," as if the speaker has lost any claim over their own parts. There is also a puzzle here. If mind and body are both mine, who is the "I" that is stuck? The poem answers in its penultimate line, "the poor soul." The speaker moves from first person to third and looks at themselves from outside, the way you might shake your head over someone else's bad luck. That mix of self-pity and detachment is the poem's emotional turn.
The central image is an argument, and it is an odd one: "not talking, / just existing." An argument without talk sounds like a paradox, but anyone who has lived in a house with a long-running quarrel knows it. Judging by the imagery, the scene is domestic, two parties sharing a space and refusing to speak, with the speaker caught between them. The word "in" matters too. The speaker is stuck "in their argument," as though it were a room with no door. The word "just" shrinks "existing" to the bare minimum. Nobody is living here, only persisting. Even "different" is a flat, understated word for what feels like a serious rift, and that understatement gives the poem its dry, tired tone.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are two to four words long, and each is a single breath. Most end in a comma, so the poem keeps almost stopping and then restarting, which suits a speaker who cannot move forward. The full stops after "different," "existing" and "argument" land like closed doors. The -ing words, "talking" and "existing," suggest something that goes on and on with no end in sight. The lowercase is also telling. Nothing in the poem is capitalised, not even the first word or the "i" in "i'm," so the speaker's self is quite literally the smallest thing on the page. This may simply be a casual writing habit, but it fits the diminished voice. The poem has no title either, only asterisks, which makes it feel like a fragment of thought caught mid-stream.
The ending is where the poem turns sharply. "The poor soul" is a gentle, slightly old-fashioned phrase, and "soul" is the one word with spiritual weight. It is the speaker's only hint at what the "I" might be, something deeper than either mind or body. Then the last line drops into "dealing with their shit," blunt and conversational. In the text as given, that line even sits slightly apart, as if the speaker's voice has slumped. The drop from the solemn to the crude is both the joke and the wound. Humour becomes a way of coping with a feeling too awkward to say politely.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. The split between mind and body is an old philosophical puzzle, but here it is put in plain speech and made recognisable. Most readers will know the feeling: a body exhausted while the mind races, or a mind full of dread while the body carries on as normal. The poem offers no solution and no reconciliation, and it ends on a complaint rather than a resolution. That honesty is its strength. It treats a feeling of being divided from yourself seriously and with a wry sense of humour, and it needs neither a backstory nor a setting to do so.